Mastering the business of the everyday

If your life were the subject of a movie or a Broadway play, what genre would it be?

• Adventure?
• Comedy?
• Horror?
• Romance?
• Tragedy?

I got to thinking about this last night while I was watching Master Class, Terrence McNally’s wonderful play about the twilight years of Maria Callas. Master Class is a funny, moving, insightful ode to music and beauty, but it’s also the study of a diva in decline.

During the 1950s, Callas was the most famous and successful opera star in the world. Though her career lasted just over a decade, she remains to this day one of the best-selling Classical recording artists of all time. She was rich, glamorous, haughty, tempestuous and controversial. (Think Madonna, but with a great voice.)

As a self-proclaimed fat, ugly child who was reared in poverty, Callas’ meteoric rise should be the stuff of fairy tales. But McNally tells a different story — one that could serve as a warning to any entrepreneur consumed with success at any cost.

In her later years, after her voice had gone and Aristotle Onassis had left her for Jackie Kennedy, Callas was reduced to teaching the occasional graduate glass at Juilliard in NYC. This is the setting for Master Class, as Callas reminisces her way through several coaching sessions. The students are her pupils, her imitators, but also her rivals — each one a potential star who could push the diva deeper into history and irrelevance.

“I don’t want to sing like you,” snaps one student, reminding Callas that she’d ruined her voice after just 10 short years onstage. “I hate people like you. You want to make the world a scary place for everybody, because it was scary for you.”

Callas insists that bitter rivalries, broken hearts and deep loneliness were simply the price she had to pay for her art and her career. But when the footlights dim and the crowds go home, she’s left to question her choices in a world that has passed her by.

In a business world with a single-minded obsession for growth, I couldn’t help wondering how some of today’s most famous entrepreneurs might fare as the subject of a McNally play. If he stripped away the trappings of success, what sort of human being would he find underneath? What sort of life?

Amy Tobin nailed this issue recently in a blog post entitled “One Thing That’s More Important than Work“:

I try to find one moment each day that is more important than work. I’ve completely accepted the fact that I am a workaholic and I will never be able to take a vacation without sneaking in some form of ‘productivity’ everyday. I know this is WHO I AM. But I refuse to be only that: a hard working, ‘successful’ person.

For Amy, the key to balance is her 4-year-old daughter, plus a conscious effort to find meaning in the seemingly mundane details of life, whether scented candles or good towels. “I still have the insatiable need to be productive,” she admits, but “now I just work around it.”

Success, growth, productivity — they’re a big part of what it means to be an entrepreneur, but only a small part of what it means to be human.

We’re hard-wired to want more. The question is, more of what?

{Photo credit: magro_kr via flickr CC}

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